Lessons of COVID19: Buy direct from UK companies
How Amazon weakens domestic businesses – and leaves us unable to meet Coronavirus demand
In May last year, a customer who purchased a CMS60D pulse oximeter made a false complaint against our company. We’d sold hundreds of these oximeters over the years, and had 5* reviews on every purchase. This one person claimed – without getting in touch with us first – that we’d sent him a used item, sold as new.
Without attempting to verify this, Amazon immediately pulled down our listing, cutting off a huge portion of cash flow to our company (this was our best selling product), and leaving us sitting on a large amount of stock. What’s more, they left UK customers with no domestic supplier – their only option to order from sellers in China who have no ability to support the product whatsoever (they are not medical professionals!).
There was nobody we could even contact about this. Despite the hundreds of pounds in fees Amazon charge us each month, the only phone contact is a call centre based in India, staffed by people who cannot help. Emails are answered by people who copy and paste generic responses, frequently investing so little time in reading your email, they don’t even check what language you wrote it in before sending back a standard response in German or Spanish. Writing to Jeff Bezos also gets you palmed off to India. The fight to clear our name took 9 months and more hours than we dare count, and in the end was only successful out of sheer serendipity – that, in the line of my work in the NHS, I met somebody who worked high up the Amazon food chain and who was willing to help.
The worst part is, we now know we’re only one negative feedback away from it happening all over again. When you supply over 900 customers every year, you’re statistically pretty likely to encounter one unreasonable or dishonest one at some point.
The cost to our business
The estimated loss of cash flow to our business was £18,000 over this period, and overall means that the business is currently operating at a loss. Amazon effectively became judge and jury of our business, in a field they know absolutely nothing about (healthcare). This is something they do all the time to businesses in the UK – just search Google and you’ll get hundreds of similar stories of businesses that have closed down because Amazon, without legitimate reason, have pulled products they’ve spent years building up the profile of in the Amazon marketplace. Often these are craft businesses, run by entrepreneurs who are carers for disabled relatives and have come up with a way of generating some extra income from home and slowly built their profile through years of hard work and great customer service. They have built Amazon’s fortunes along the way by using Amazon as their marketplace, but then their entire livelihoods are cut off, without warning – just like that.
Businesses are practically forced to sell through Amazon nowadays, because so many people use it as their default shopping portal. People don’t seek out companies directly any more, and they can’t be bothered to fill in their details at checkout with a company they’ve not used before when, with Amazon, it’s already saved and can be done in a single click.
By the time our ability to sell was finally reinstated in December 2019, we’d begun to run low on other medical devices, but we were unable to reorder because so much of our cash was tied up in the stock Amazon had banned us from selling. Our order sizes had to shrink to only 100 or so items at a time. We estimate that our business would recover by around April 2020, and we’d be able to return to our normal ordering cycles and quantities.
COVID19
Then, Coronavirus hit the UK. Demand for our pulse oximeters soared, but instead of our usual buffer of 200 CMS50DLs, we had 20. Instead of our usual buffer of 200 CMS50E, we had 80. We were running low on neonate and paediatric probes for our CMS60Ds. Contec Medical were unable to take our order because their government had ordered them to produce for domestic hospitals only. The damage Amazon had done to our business in the preceding 9 months meant that we were less prepared than ever before to meet the needs of our clients, at the very time when they needed us the most.
Demand for the products we stock continues to increase on a daily basis from GPs, hospitals, paramedics and even home users. On top of the damage done to our ability to be prepared for this demand by Amazon from last year, marketplaces like Amazon and eBay are shamelessly profiting from this crisis – whilst sending out emails warning sellers not to increase their pricing during this time of crisis, and that punishment awaits anyone who does. Yet, neither Amazon nor eBay are reducing their fees for sellers of these devices, even as our costs of getting hold of them increase. As well as high selling fees, they also hold onto our funds for weeks, sometimes months – PayPal holds onto 10% of every sale for 3 months – meaning that small businesses are running out of stock but not being given access to their own money with which to reorder. When profit margins are lower than 10% as it is, this missing 10% of capital is severely limiting. It’s the difference, for example, between being able to reorder 1000 more oximeters, or 1100, during this two day window of ordering opportunity before Contec Medical shut down for international orders once again. It’s the difference of 100 more people in the UK being able to get a genuine, safe, UK-supported CMS50DL fingertip pulse oximeter delivered to them within 24 hours, or having to take their chances buying what will likely be an imitation product from China of questionable accuracy – given that all genuine Contec Medical equipment is being directed to Chinese hospitals and not sold to retail customers outside of China.
These next few months will bring up many issues that have been quietly simmering for years: chronic underinvestment in our NHS; the vulnerability of workers who are ‘self employed’ but, in reality, work for a company (such as delivery drivers); our reliance on foreign manufacturing; the failure of HMRC to police imports into our country and prevent tax evasion by foreign sellers, undermining UK businesses who must abide by the law and cannot compete. And, on top of all of these things, the gradual weakening and destruction of domestic businesses by the monopoly and uncontrolled power of huge, exploitative US corporations.
Conveience always comes at a price, and now we are paying it. Please, don’t keep letting Amazon profit from destruction and crisis. Cancel Prime, uninstall your App. Make the extra effort to buy direct from UK businesses, now and forever more, in as many areas of your life as you possibly can. Domestic businesses are the only ones who can be mobilised for their local population at times of crisis, and we need them present and strong.